Assessment Policy and Inequality: the United Kingdom experience

The UK is typical of many industrialised countries at the present time in searching for new kinds of assessment procedure which will be appropriate on the one hand to the goals of the more vocational curricula currently being developed and, on the other, be relevant to the whole range of pupil needs and achievement. The paper explores the impetus behind such changes and argues that the policies so generated embody a number of political and educational contradictions. Using recent developments in England and Scotland as a case study, the paper argues that, despite their egalitarian potential in educational terms, the underlying political climate of cost‐efficiency and laissez‐faire individualism which in turn inhibits any substantial change in traditional educational values is likely to result in reinforced, rather than reduced social divisions being associated with such initiatives.